One of the five prominent developers, Mike Hearn, also a former chair of the bitcoin foundation's law and policy committee, revealed in a blogpost that he would be selling his coins and ending further development on the project because it has failed.

"Despite knowing that bitcoin could fail all along, the now inescapable conclusion that it has failed still saddens me greatly," he wrote.

"What was meant to be a new, decentralised form of money that lacked ‘systemically important institutions' and ‘too big to fail' has become something even worse: a system completely controlled by just a handful of people."

According to Hearn, the heart of its failure lies with the community's refusal to adopt new standards which would allow it grow consistently while maintaining stability. Bitcoin is an open source software, meaning anyone can use or tweak it, but there is only one official release of it.

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Though anyone can propose a change, only the five developers have the authority to put these changes into the released version, but it is these five who have been split for the past six months on how to deal with bitcoins capacity problems as it grows.

In August, Hearn and bitcoin lead developer Gavin Andresen released a rival version of the current software, dubbed Bitcoin XT. This would increase the existing block size of one megabyte to eight megabytes, allowing 24 transactions to be processed every second. Hearn however says the software has not been adopted by the ‘mining' computers that secure the network. This in effect means, when the volume of transactions increases the bitcoin network will run out capacity, making the network unreliable and vulnerable to fraud.

Since the announcement, the cryptocurrency slid by 10%. Hearn is now working for the R3CEV consortium of banks working on using the block chain technology that underpins bitcoin in financial markets.